This project was organized by Heather M. Mikolaj (Curator) and Clare
Haggarty (Assistant Curator), in collaboration with University of
California, Santa Cruz faculty Dee Hibbert-Jones and E.G. Crichton

Subversive Complicity brings together a group of artists whose work
inhabits the interstices of contemporary life – physical, temporal, and
conceptual gaps within existing structures – in order to subvert
everyday systems and raise social awareness in subtle, humorous, and
radical ways. What happens when artists working within these spaces
adapt and co-opt the strategies, languages, mannerisms, and
visualizations from divergent social personas and cultural sources to
create alternative modes of action and expression? The resulting range
of projects presented in this exhibition suggests the myriad of
possibilities for public and private transformation to emerge when
artists assume such diverse roles as agent provocateur, broadcaster,
political activist, conversationalist, oral historian, engineer,
broker, trader, benefactor, gamer, and even evangelist. Through gallery
documentation of past actions and a series of ongoing and special
events these artists invite audiences into a set of conversations,
resistances, and exchanges at once real and imagined, geographic and
social, local and global. Come join us in this exploration of how art
can disrupt, re-shape, and otherwise invigorate our daily existence
through interventions enacted on the streets of San Francisco, across
the landscape of the Bay Area, and within other cities and virtual
realities far beyond. This exhibition was developed in association with
the Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice Festival hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. For more information, please visit: http://may2008.artintervention.org/ .